Young Hands Club

I did some initial moping about my failings of this week, but after jotting down some notes to get started I’ve been feeling more cheerful about the process. I take this as a promising start; may it grow into that healthy curiosity that I bring to bear in so many other areas.

First the good side:

• Robinson and I completed a trade on the local OTC market to replenish cash on hand (though belts remain tight and we need to get more sales closed).
• I made progress on wallet testing, getting a transaction confirmed and turning up a corner case in PRB network behavior that may inform a tweak to the spec.
• Our Unix and management consulting exchange Monday turned up the priority of having a placement test, for which I implemented an initial version.
• We celebrated Robinson’s birthday.
• I provided some input to Robinson’s history presentation at a (sparsely attended) Junto.
• I brought up the problem of allowing ourselves to be pushed around about meetings.
• I met the prospect Robinson had been talking with at his office, where we all talked a while – probably too long really, we should have planned a limit – and finished with a couple games of ping-pong.
• I ended up finding some simple steps to substantially unjam my email inbox. It turned out I’d set myself up well with segregated addresses and most of the spam was coming to ones that could be dropped. While email isn’t the greatest, I still much prefer it to the alternatives for semi-private textual communication with the uninitiated.

The bad:

• I got little done relative to plan on the wallet and it remains unfinished.
• I got very little writing done for the blog (again), yet lost time on …actively not-starting. I don’t know why. I should (again) speak up and ask for help, even just feedback on outlines, not like that’s only for Will!
• I dropped the ball on my planned leisure reading, which skimping doesn’t seem to have produced even a temporary productivity gain.
• I missed the simplest item from my plan of getting contact info on my blog. It would get stuck behind “what I really need is to write the article, then I’ll take care of that…”
• I passed on a chance to try working my writing in a different direction with the Qntra lead I stumbled on, that I could have probably written up myself in all the time I otherwise burnt.
• I mostly avoided or delayed self-improvement work such as considering Diana Coman’s feedback on last review, and journaling. I’m letting the valuable resource of her available insight go underutilized.

One simple change I can make is to firm up on my journaling time, and when not otherwise inspired, apply it toward the reflection assignments I’ve already been given.